Former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw is featured prominently in a new ad from the Romney campaign focusing on Newt Gingrich’s House ethics violation in the mid-1990s.  The ad, entitled “History Lesson,” is a 30 second excerpt from NBC Nightly News the day Gingrich was found guilty by House Democrats and Republicans in an ethics investigation.

In an unprecedented move, lawyers for NBC News have demanded that the Romney camp remove the ad.  In a statement, Brokaw himself writes:

“I am extremely uncomfortable with the extended use of my personal image in this political ad. I do not want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign.”

Really, Tom?  Big concerns over your “role as a journalist compromised for political gain”?  Take another look at that video and listen to the condescending, judgmental way the Gingrich story was framed by Brokaw back in 1997.  He and his teleprompter feeders went out of their way at the time to make Gingrich appear to be the biggest hypocrite and crook in American political history.  Check out the way the ethics committee’s wrist slap was framed:  (more…)

When President Obama called for an end to congressional insider trading during his State of the Union Address last night, there may have been some colorful Greek expletives muttered by a multi-millionaire publisher we all know and love.

When Breitbart News began our coverage of Peter Schweizer’s best-selling book Throw Them All Out, AOL/Huffington Post was quick to proclaim the story dead on arrival.  Their full-page headline proudly proclaimed “Hit Job Falls Flat,” which displayed lousy journalism on multiple levels. AOL/HuffPo characterized the diligently investigated report as a “hit job,” they prematurely proclaimed the story a failure and as we revealed at the time, they allowed Arianna Huffington’s cozy relationship with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to falsely inform their readers that there was no validity to the congressional insider trading scandal.

Here we are, only ten weeks after AOL/Huffpo called our story a dud, there have been multiple congressional and senate hearings, three different laws drafted and now, using his ultimate bully pulpit, President Obama said this:

What a humiliating moment for the smart-set over at AOL/HuffPo when their candidate lends this level of importance to a story they tried hard to spike. There was a time when AOL/HuffPo tried to sell themselves to the public as a new brand of aggressive and independent journalism fighting against the old guard media who no longer resonate with the American public. Now, AOL/HuffPo is the old guard, running interference for political cronies and using their $300 million megaphone to try to shout-down others who don’t fall in line.

The old-guard media versus new media conflict has less to do with the method of delivery of the news (newsprint versus kilobytes) as much as it has to do with the stale, predictable establishment philosophy that permeates the newsrooms of these organizations.  Take a liberal political reporter from the old-guard like Howard Fineman out of the Newsweek office and put him in the high-tech environment of AOL/HuffPo and you still have the same old repetitive and destructive mindset you had before.

This phenomenon, and what sets true citizen journalism apart from the cronies in the establishment media, was best revealed on my show last night by the journalist who got all this started in the first place, Peter Schweizer, author of Throw Them All Out:

Drudge dropped a bomb on the South Carolina Primary in a big way last night with an old-school siren and everything.  After wearing out command/control + r on millions of laptops in America, Drudge finally revealed a few details on a story involving Newt Gingrich’s second wife (and second ex-wife) Marianne Gingrich.

According to the exclusive report, ABC News’ Brian Ross had a revealing interview with Ms. Gingrich earlier this week and the contents of the report are so explosive that ABC News executives at first ordered the story to be kept under wraps until this Monday, 48 hours after the South Carolina primary, then they changed their minds to Friday. At the time of this writing they changed the air date to Thursday.

The idea that corporate executives determine what information can and cannot be released by a news outlet lest the news effect voters behavior raises serious ethical issues that need to be explored.

According to Drudge:

ABCNEWS suits determined it would be “unethical” to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates.

Assuming the report is accurate, one has to ask “how close is ‘too close’ to voting day for a story to break?”  Is it three days?  Four?  How about seven?  Who makes this determination?  Is this just a rule for a primary, or for a general election as well?  Will the network be this introspective and reserved when they receive the inevitable October Surprise from Team Axelrod?

News is news is news is news.

When we receive information that is relevant to Americans making an informed decision is not the business of an unnamed executive who likes to play God with the news of the day.  The networks and newspapers of the old media are so obsessed with being the “gate-keepers” and having the all-important job of protecting the American public from having too much information that our delicate sensibilities can’t handle that we end up with squashed stories about blue dresses, ex-wives and Islamist terrorist sympathizers partying with an unknown State Senator from Illinois.

And by the way, if the ABC News executives were trying to “protect’ Gingrich from this story they’ve done a miserable job.  If they squash it until after the voting Newt is in a horrible position.  The story has leaked (as these stories always do) and now little trickles have seeped out onto the Internet, talk radio and eventually cable news.  By the time CNN holds tomorrow night’s debate in Charleston everyone will have already formed an opinion about a story that none of us have really been able to see. Poor Newt Gingrich will be unable to address any single, specific part of the story because, like the rest of us, he doesn’t really have any idea what, specifically is in the story.  So instead, our imaginations will run away with us and assume the worst and Newt can’t do a thing about it.

Airing it on Thursday, two days before the primary, implies a deliberate attempt to influence the outcome.

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Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes reveal on MSNBC that they were invited to a private, “off the record” briefing during the payroll tax cut debate a two weeks ago. According to Hayes, the White House let the liberal journalists know that the President was prepared to let the tax cut expire and blame Republicans. This threat ultimately led to what was seen as a Republican capitulation on the issue.
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Is it a coincidence that four days after Nancy Pelosi sat and gave an exclusive pep talk/schmooze session with AOL’s Arianna Huffington and an all-female editorial meeting in the offices of AOL/HuffPo, Arianna’s Washington Bureau Chief phoned-in a “nothing-to-see-here” apologia for the former-Speaker’s congressional insider trading scandal?

Huffington Post's wishful thinking headline a few hours after a "60 Minutes" report on congressional insider trading.

As liberal news outlets like CBS News, Daily Beast/Newsweek and even MSNBC saw fit to report the fact that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was involved in a sweetheart IPO for VISA, while at the same time ensuring that tough regulations that would have stifled VISA’s profits stayed bottled up in the Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives, AOL/HuffPo opted to re-print Pelosi’s talking points and obfuscations in lieu of doing actual reporting.

With the awkward and ham-handed headline “Hit Job Falls Flat,” you can almost see Arianna herself hammering out bullet points on her blackberry, firing them off to reporter Ryan Grim in an effort to put her elegant fingers in the metaphorical dyke to stop the gushing in the most serious corruption story to hit Pelosi’s long career.  The banner headline, full of wishful thinking, ran just hours after the “60 Minutes” story.  First thing on a Monday morning at the beginning of a news cycle is a curious time to declare that a story “fell flat.”

In fact, the story was talked about on cable news and in the halls of congress all day.  It inspired new legislation to finally make the corrupt practice of congressional insider trading illegal.  Presidential candidate Rick Perry produced a 30-second ad featuring the story and calling for jail-time for any politician who profited from insider information.  If this is “falling flat” I would like to see AOL/HuffPo’s idea of a successful investigative report.

Seriously, I’d really like to see one.  Do they even do anything like that, or do they just sit back and let the rest of us do all of the real reporting?

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Liberal columnist Byron Williams of the Oakland Tribune said that MSNBC’s hiring of Al Sharpton for its 6PM slot was “more about ratings than journalism.” Now that the first month of ratings are in, the hire might end up damaging MSNBC in BOTH categories.

The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer at 6 pm topped MSNBC’s Politics Nation with Al Sharpton in the key demo 25-54 (163k vs. 141k) in September. In addition, the Blitzer-led program grew +19% in the demo (163k vs. 137k) and +22% among total viewers (590k vs. 483k) vs. last year. Sharpton was down -24% in the demo (141k vs. 185k) and -15% in total viewers (599k vs. 708k) compared to MSNBC’s programming a year ago.

The story is even more damaging when you look inside the numbers and realize that the 5:00 PM edition of “Hardball”, which airs right before Sharpton’s show, had more viewers than the civil rights activist-turned television journalist.  “Hardball” also beat Blitzer and CNN in that 5:00 PM time slot.

In other words, viewers who aren’t watching Fox News prefer MSNBC to CNN during the 5PM “Hardball” hour and then switch channels and watch CNN or Fox News when Sharpton appears on their screen. (more…)

This is all that remains of the very popular Ford commercial that went viral on the internet and was featured on cable news channels over the past three weeks:

According to the Detroit News, Ford has pulled the ad due to pressure from the Obama White House:

Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House questioned whether the copy was publicly denigrating the controversial bailout policy CEO Alan Mulally repeatedly supported in the dark days of late 2008, in early ‘09 and again when the ad flap arose. And more.

With President Barack Obama tuning his re-election campaign amid dismal economic conditions and simmering antipathy toward his stimulus spending and associated bailouts, the Ford ad carried the makings of a political liability when Team Obama can least afford yet another one. Can’t have that.

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart.com, the “star” of the popular ad, Chris McDaniel told me he was “a little bit flustered’ by Ford’s decision. He found out about it during a live radio interview this morning. “I had no idea. As soon as I got off the interview, I sent an e-mail to Ford’s VP of Marketing.” He told me, “I put myself out there on the line. You either stand behind it or you don’t.”

Ford has not yet returned Mr. McDaniel’s e-mail.

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In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today’s young may well get less than they put in).

Of course we all recognize that bit of inflammatory scare-mongering from Gov. Rick Perry’s book “Fed Up!” in which he tells the inconvenient truth about Social Security that every American knows but no politician is forth-right enough to confront.  That in its current state, it is doomed to fail and leave generations that had paid into it stuck without the return they were promised. In short: A Ponzi Scheme.

Oh, wait… my mistake. Thanks to some excellent work by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge.com I now see that the quote above is not from Gov. Perry but from a young, idealistic economist named Paul Krugman writing in the Boston Review in 1997.

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In the same way he tried to capitalize on the horrific Tucson shooting as an excuse to attack Sarah Palin and conservatives, Paul Krugman has used his New York Times blog to attack Rudy Giuliani and President George W. Bush this morning in a most disgusting way:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te (sic) atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

There is nothing wrong with reflecting on the events of ten years ago and making social and political judgements on our leaders’ reactions over the past decade.  In fact, most of us here at “The Bigs” have done so this morning at Big Government.

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By now we’ve all heard the reprehensible remarks made by Congressional Black Caucus Whip Andre Carson (D-IN) where he told the audience at a CBC Jobs Fair Town Hall in Miami that Tea Party Congressmen would like to lynch black people. Given the opportunity to revise or retract his remarks, Carson instead stood by “the truth” of his comments.

So now it seems pretty fair to say that Andre Carson is a race-baiting bigot who has brought shame upon the U. S. House of Representatives. But any regular reader of Big Government knows that this is not new information. In fact, Andre Carson’s despicable, divisive slander of August 22nd is just the latest of bogus attacks made by the 2nd term congressman against the Tea Party. Andre Carson is the man who told the mother of all race-baiting lies against the Tea Party: That racial slurs were screamed “fifteen times” at he and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) in Washington DC on the day before the ObamaCare vote in 2010.

The headlines at the time (as well as Topic #1 on cable news and Sunday talk shows) was “Racist Tea Party Yells ‘N-Word’ at Civil Rights Icon John Lewis”. Andre Carson’s name was hardly mentioned in any of the stories. But a Big Government investigation revealed that it was he, in fact, who gathered Capitol Hill reporters around himself on March 20, 2010 and breathlessly told them what had happened “outside of Cannon (Congressional Office Building)” just moments before. (audio courtesy Kerry Pickett, Washington Times)

By now you know the story become part of Democratic Party lore showing up in talking points as recently as just last week as Alan Colmes mangled the “facts” but still was able to perpetuate the lie on Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor”. You should also know by now that Andrew Breitbart offered a $100, 000 reward for anyone who can produce video proof o the supposed racial hatred. The only videos uncovered were found by the Big Government staff. They show the exact moment Carson described, “down the steps of Cannon”, from four different angles. Not only were there no slurs heard on any of the videos, but the scene is not at all how Carson described it to Capitol Hill reporters.

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It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.  On this morning’s “Today Show” on NBC, GOP candidate Jon Huntsmann was interviewed by intrepid reporter Savannah Guthrie.  After indulging Huntsmann in his usual cookie-cutter “I’m the moderate choice” responses Guthrie decided to cut to the chase and ask one of those biased questions that don’t actually require a response, because the actual intent of the journalist is to communicate a message to the audience:

“Do you think that Governor Perry or Michele Bachmann are too far right to win and beat President Obama?”

A quick look at Real Clear Politics National Polling Averages shows that the data doesn’t support the premise of Guthrie’s question.

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Why would a journalist for MSNBC sit on an explosive story for over a week and allow her company’s competitors to report on it first?  It’s hard to believe that the answer to that question is anything but political bias.

By now we’ve all heard the inflammatory and divisive rhetoric Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) spewed at an August 22nd “Job’s Fair” sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus. As reported on several websites and discussed on Fox News, Carson said this about the Tea Party coalition in Congress:

“This is the effort that we are seeing of Jim Crow. Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us as second class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now with this Tea Party movement would love to see you and me (I’m sorry Tamron*) hanging on a tree,”

The statement was featured at Breitbart.tv and has been reported by ABC News, Fox News, Washington Post, NY Times, Huffington Post, CNN, USA Today, NY Daily News and many local news outlets.  Yet a search of “Andre Carson” on  MSNBC.com turns up nothing about this story.  And that’s curious considering one of MSNBC’s daytime anchors was sitting only a few feet away from Carson when he made the statement.
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Last night saw the debut of Al Sharpton’s new show on NBC News’ cable outlet MSNBC.  “Politics Nation” started with a monologue by the host delivered in his now familiar bumbling, bewildering and bombastic style.  Though a couple sentences were not easy to understand, the over-all message was clear: The GOP candidates for president are like pre-1960’s racist segregationists.

Considering Sharpton’s entire career leading up to this point pretty much consists of him making loud accusations of “racist” through a bull horn, we shouldn’t be too surprised that the man MSNBC President Phil Griffin described as an “elder statesman” is going back to what he does best in this premiere show.  Sharpton himself made it clear to the audience that this is what his show was going to be about.  So we have a good year ahead of us leading up to election day with a nightly assault on conservatives by none other than the most successful race-baiting defamer available, Al Sharpton.

The beauty of the Al Sharpton hire is that it puts pressure on lefty TV critics to set their obvious affinity for his politics aside and actually give an honest critique of his television performance.  I’ve been wondering for weeks if TV critics would run the risk of the inevitible accusation of “racism” in order to give their readers an honest assesment of Sharpton’s obviously inferior talent and abilities as a TV host.

It appears they are, in fact, willing to take that risk.  Here’s the take from Ken Tucker at Entertainment Weekly:

The Rev. Al Sharpton premiered PoliticsNation on MSNBC Monday evening with an hour of booming bombast and near-obliviousness, as he steam-rolled over his guests, interrupting them to ask long, halting questions. At one point he acted as though he was having an argument with his teleprompter and said with exasperation to a guest, “Well, let me just ask you my way: Is the Tea Party going to destroy the Republican Party?”

But, of course, Tucker had to let his poitics get in the way of a full and honest criticism of Sharpton himself and instead blamed his producers for not letting Al be “Al”:

It was an awkward 60 minutes, with a lurching pace that failed to play to Sharpton’s strengths. He raised interesting issues — about new efforts at voter suppression, for example — only to lead aimless discussions of them.

[...]

If he can ever become comfortable on-camera and expand his horizons, Sharpton may eventually bring to MSNBC the combination of intellect and passion that has made so many of his press conferences over the years little wonders of argument, controversy, hype, entertainment, and enlightenment. Whether he’ll ever reach that point on PoliticsNation remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, at New York Magazine, the headline reads, “How Did Al Sharpton End Up With a Show on MSNBC?”:

Earlier, in a blustery opening segment, he was similarly rattled and unsteady as he tore through a case against Republican promises of restoring states’ rights. It was hard to follow as he shouted and pointed his pen at the camera, speaking passionately, but often in circles.

There has been quite a bit of controversy over the Sharpton hire and the work his community agitation group, National Action Network, has done for Comcast, the new owner of NBC.  And MSNBC President Phil Griffin received the “Keepers of the Dream” award from the group earlier this year for doing so much to fulfil Martin Luther King’s vision for America.  This was awarded while Griffin had a completely Caucasian line-up on his network.

Given teh raised eyebrows over the entanglement between Comcast/NBC and Sharpton’s controversial group, it’s surprising to see the blatant promotion of National Action Network on the well-trafficked pages of MSNBC.  Take a look at the home page for the new Sharpton show.  it has a highly prominent link right in the center that directs readers to the non-profit’s web site:

Sharpton finished his show with a message to the viewer explaining that he would not “be a robot reading from the teleprompter robotic-ally.”  Then, for those who had still stuck around for the final minute of “Politics Nation”, Al Sharpton, NBC News’ newest star, danced.

Resist we much.

It only took a few days for NBC News’ newest star Al Sharpton to insult his colleagues and further undermine the already diminished journalistic credibility of MSNBC.

In an interview with The Daily Beast the controversial activist turned TV news anchor defended himself against criticism from the National Association of Black Journalists.  (emphasis mine)

“To be fair about it, the NABJ understood that if I didn’t get it, it wouldn’t have gone to a journalist,” Sharpton tells me. “It’s a moot point. There are no journalists [as hosts] after 5 p.m. on MSNBC. Everyone after 5 deals with opinions. So the argument is kind of apples and oranges.”

In an effort to defend himself from the obvious observation that there are many more qualified journalists (of any color) to fill a nightly anchor spot at MSNBC, Sharpton has inadvertently “outed” Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell and Ed Schultz as mere commentators voicing opinions rather than legitimate journalists presenting news as well as ideas and opinions to their audience.  For the sake of this column, let’s forget O’Donnell and Schultz for a moment because their shows do border on the brink of pot and pan banging temper tantrums, let’s just focus on Matthews and Maddow.

One has to wonder how Chris Matthews feels about his new workmate telling the world that he isn’t a journalist.  Matthews spent fifteen years writing for the San Francisco Examiner.  He’s covered politics for decades on behalf of newspapers and television news bureaus.  I bet if you asked him, he’d say he was a journalist.

And Rhodes Scholar Maddow (a title Sharpton could never dream of acquiring) also has her share of opinions on her show, but she also prides herself on her excellent team of researchers who painstakingly dig for stories and facts to present news to their viewers.  Look how she presented herself in her first “Lean Forward” ad.  Surely you can see that she considers herself a journalist obsessed with details and facts, not opinion:

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“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house” – NBC News’ Al Sharpton

After weeks of speculation, Al Sharpton has been named the official host of the 6:00 PM ET slot on NBC News’ cable outlet MSNBC.  The show, titled Politics Nation, will officially debut on August 29th.

From Reuters:

“I am very happy and honored to join the MSNBC team as we collectively try to get America to ’Lean Forward,’” Sharpton said in a statement. “It is a natural extension of my life work and growth. We all learn from our pain and stand up from our stumbling and one must either learn to lean forward or fall backwards. I’m glad they have given me the opportunity to continue my forward lean.”

One has to wonder what the “evaluation trial period” really consisted of over the past few weeks.  Big Journalism and Breitbart.tv have cataloged daily examples of incompetence, buffoonery and outright conflict of interest from the self-proclaimed “Reverend” featuring the viral video of the summer, “Resist We Much.”

Here is an example of the amateurism on display during the Sharpton show pulled from just the past ten days:

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Something huge will happen at 6:00 PM on MSNBC today.

As a regular viewer of the yet-to-be-named Al Sharpton show, I’ve come to expect momentous TV moments during this time of day.  Whether it’s Sharpton’s patented rambling nonsensical statements that are supposed to be questions for his painfully uncomfortable guests, or his famous ad-libs that give us instant classics like “Resist we much”, Sharpton has provided endless hours of excruciating entertainment.

But tonight, expectations are even higher.

On yesterday’s show Al Sharpton followed the lead of his on-air colleague Ed Schultz and accused presidential candidate Rick Perry of racism when he proclaimed that a “black cloud” was hanging over America.  As any regular reader of Big Journalism knows by now, the accusation is completely false and contrived.  Producers at The Ed Show deceptively edited the Texas governor’s words and cut him off in mid-sentence.  His actual statement was that there was a “black cloud hanging over America, this debt that is so monstrous.”

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Looks like the long knives are coming out over at NBC News’ cable outlet MSNBC.

After yesterday’s hilarious and painful performance by their newest star, Al Sharpton, blogs and media observers were quick to write headlines describing the incident as a “TelePrompter Mishap”.  Huffington Post sexy headline: “Al Sharpton’s Teleprompter Flub” implied that MSNBC’s host couldn’t read or his crew screwed up.  Politico chimed in with “Al Sharpton’s Teleprompter Trouble” again suggesting that it was probably an equipment malfunction.

MediaBistro called it a “Ridiculous Flub on MSNBC” and wrote “Sharpton began an editorial on the Wisconsin recall elections, but partway through his TelePrompTer failed, and after flubbing a couple of lines he moved on.”

But this morning, MediaBistro added an update to their post which clears up all of the assumptions journalists made about the origins of the Sharpton on-air mishap and shows that Sharpton has some enemies over on the set of his show:

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MSNBC didn’t even pretend to be objective last night with their coverage of the Big Labor financed recall effort against six Republican State Senators in Wisconsin. Instead of the standard, sober, in-studio reporting one would expect from a news gency reporting on the results of an election, MSNBC staged what can only be described as an outdoor pep rally complete with screaming crowds holding eerily fascist-inspired signs (red with raised, clenched fist, really?).

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On yesterday morning’s “Reliable Sources” with Howard Kurtz on CNN, media critic Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times spoke out about the grave reservations expressed after the imminent hiring of activist and failed presidential candidate Al Sharpton as a prime time news anchor for NBC News’ cable station MSNBC.

Big Journalism began beating the drum over NBC News’ latest “brand downgrade” last week when we showed our readers the insidious relationship between MSNBC’s parent company, Comcast and Al Sharpton’s political action group National Action Network.  The incestuous relationship between Comcast’s $190,000 “donations” to Sharpton’s community agitator organization and Sharpton’s subsequent endorsement of the “diversity goals” of the new Comcast/NBC entity don’t pass the smell test.  Especially when you consider that Sharpton’s diversity endorsement proved critical to the FCC approval of the merger. It seems too convenient that he would now be rewarded with a prime time hosting gig on NBC’s cable news outlet.

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Just when you thought the NBC News cable outlet (MSNBC) had gone too far, they somehow find a way to out do themselves in propaganda hysteria aimed at their favorite Bogey man: The Tea Party. Martin Bashir (the reporter who anchors the mid-day “news” portion of the MSNBC programming schedule) presented an entire segment yesterday featuring a psychologist who explained that the Tea Party movement consists of “delusional addicts” who could very well turn “violent” in the near future.

You’ll recall that Keith Olbermann led the charge at the Peacock Network by giving voice to angry spinster Janeane Garofalo and her well reasoned “Tea Party Is Racist/Limbic Brain” theory.  The rest of their line-up wasn’t far behind with Matthews, Maddow and Schultz presenting the “violent rhetoric” stories, the “Racial Slurs at John Lewis” legend, or the “Tea Partiers are Terrorist/Hostage Takers” story lines.  They’ve thrown all these slanders against the wall to see what would stick and through it all, the politicians and the voters who continue to argue for smaller government, lower taxes and less federal regulation keep their heads down, persevere and ultimately prevail.
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